


no roads home

by goldcarnations



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Emotionally Repressed, F/M, Phone Calls & Telephones, Pining, Post-Canon, Romance, Unhealthy Relationships, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:53:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25091911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldcarnations/pseuds/goldcarnations
Summary: She never could just let go of him, ofthem,whatever they were.
Relationships: Annie Edison/Jeff Winger
Comments: 13
Kudos: 70





	no roads home

**Author's Note:**

> set post-canon. 6x13 just fucked me up ok

Annie stays in Washington DC for longer than expected.

The internship turns into a job opportunity, a summer stretches into half a year, and it’s so much more painless than she previously anticipated. She grows to love DC. She learns to appreciate the historical significance, the painful humidity, the intensity of being surrounded by cutthroat ambition. Now she’s starting to adjust to the rapidly dropping temperature and the grunt work of an entry level job. Her own swampy, blissful little purgatory. 

Annie still stays in touch with everyone from her old study group, of course. She coaches Abed through cooking foods other than buttered noodles on Facetime. She listens to Britta rant over the phone about her job and the school, and then lets herself be criticized half-heartedly for being “a part of the system”, if that even means anything anymore in their conversations. She sends fun postcards to Frankie and letters to Shirley and occasionally the wayward text to Chang if she’s feeling especially sentimental.

And, of course, she stays in touch with Jeff. 

But that’s different.

He’s still her speed dial contact. It was useful back in the day when there were all kinds of shenanigans nearly every week at Greendale, but she hasn’t had a single emergency in DC yet. It’s kind of impractical, actually—she would never have any good reason to call someone thousands of miles away if she were actually in a position to use it—but she’s never had the heart to change the contact.

She never quite learned how to outgrow him.

* * *

They call sometimes. 

More specifically, they call at the end of a long day, when she misses him, when her apartment feels a little too big for one person. When she can't stop thinking about the kiss on her last day in an empty study room, among other provoking incidents.

It’s unhealthier than it sounds, which is saying something.

* * *

“Hello? Who is this?”

Jeff does it every single time they talk on the phone, as if he hasn’t already had her contact saved for years.

It’s supposed to be funny and a little mean—trademark Jeff behavior. Annie would be sick of the gag and maybe insulted by what it’s insinuating, but it’s so far from how he actually seems to feel about her that she never gets too offended by it.

She rolls her eyes good-naturedly. 

There’s no one around to see it, obviously. 

“It’s Annie Edison, you jerk.”

“ _Annie_? What a fun surprise,” he says, jovial. She clearly caught him in a good mood, or maybe he’s just faking it for her. A secret part of her hopes that it’s the latter, that he’s putting in the effort just for this call. “It’s our resident FBI Agent, checking in. No, I haven’t done anything illegal, officer.”

“FBI Agent? I’ve still got a long way to go.”

“Ugh, really? Then what are you wasting your time doing over there?”

“Paperwork,” she declares with a mustered enthusiasm. “And data analysis.”

“Sounds sexy.”

“It isn’t as bad as it sounds.”

“I sure hope not.” There’s a pause. “You sound tired. Are you taking care of yourself?”

She winces despite herself, glancing at the clock. Truthfully, no—the hours she’s poured into the job are starting to catch up to her. It’s only a quarter past ten and already she’s dead tired. 

“Long day,” she says instead. It’s not technically a lie.

“You should get some rest.”

“Mhm.”

“I mean it.”

She scoffs out loud. “ _Okay_. Yeah, I’ll get some rest and the paperwork will just write itself.”

He laughs, quiet and low. She thrills in it. He doesn’t laugh often, so it always feels earned when she coaxes one out of him, even when it’s directed at her. “I should have known who I was dealing with.”

“Cheer me up instead,” she tells him. “Tell me about Greendale.”

“Oh, you know. It’s the usual. I feel good about this year, though.”

“Really—why? What are your students like?”

“I don’t know, just a feeling. I’ve got a whole new group of dummies. Highly impressionable. Insufferably optimistic about the way this year’s gonna go. Just the way I like ‘em before I crush ‘em.”

“ _Aw_ , don’t do that. Poor kids.”

She can envision Jeff’s grin in her mind’s eye—sarcastic and shark-like, sardonically pleased at the notion. 

“I'll try not to, just for you,” he says. “Although who knows. I get bored.”

Annie pouts, even though he still can’t see her. The two of them have always been so good at playing pretend. These calls are the most thrill-inducing kind of pretending, the kind where they’re walking together carefully on the most fragile of eggshells. One wrong move and—boom! Six years of unresolved sexual tension, gooey and smeared all over them like egg yolks.

She knows that Jeff can’t help but test how hard he can step, though. He challenges the structural integrity of those goddamn eggshells every time they call.

“I get bored a lot without you here, Annie,” he says. “Remember those adventures we used to have? Solving mysteries? Saving community colleges?”

Annie giggles despite herself. “We saved _one_ community college.”

“Ah, yeah. But the effort we put in could have saved twenty.”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

“Only around you.”

Annie suppresses a giddy smile. He knows just how to charm her, his voice disarming in a way that makes her feel like a teenager again. It’s so addictive that she allows herself to forget that he said goodbye to her months ago and to ignore the thousands of miles between them, if only just for now.

She suggests, coy, “Well, if you get too bored and want me to tease you in person, you should take a couple sick days and fly out to see me in DC.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, sure! Then I can show you around. You’ll love seeing the Supreme Court up close and personal.”

“I think the old me would have loved DC,” he muses. “I think if my past self ever set foot there he would’ve gotten a hard-on for all that soulless ambition.”

“Pshaw. I still think the old Jeff was a big softie. You just didn’t show it as often.”

“Oh no, am I showing it too often now?”

“Maybe, but I like you better this way. You’re much sweeter now.”

Annie doesn’t even realize the direction of their conversation until Jeff falls silent on the other end.

They’re tiptoeing into dangerous territory. _Old_ territory. She’s reminded of the ambiguity of their relationship back in college, when there was that constant, frustrating spark between the two of them that was always far too flirty and charged to be ignored. 

Just the thing she was trying to avoid, but currently doing terribly at. 

In a moment of realization, Annie decides that she should stop the trajectory of where this is going. Some things are so inevitable that she can be distinctly aware of how she should take action to fix the future, somehow. Combat the unavoidable.

“I think I have to go,” Annie says abruptly, unsure of herself.

Jeff pauses on the other side. She’s certain that he’s figured out what’s happening, and the silence is telling. He’s terrible at avoiding whatever this is too and they both know it.

“Right. Yeah. Of course.”

A silence, because she doesn’t actually want to hang up. She stares at the red button to end the call and wills herself to press it. 

She doesn’t.

He doesn’t end the call either, and the silence is expectant and thick with _wanting_ , but of what exactly she's not sure. She hates herself for lacking the willpower to do what needs to be done, and hates him for not reacting to her hesitation.

Stupid Jeff. Stupid _Annie_. 

She never could just let go of him, of _them_ , whatever they were. And worse, he clearly couldn’t either.

“You know I regretted it for longer than a week, right?” she says, before her brain can catch up to her mouth.

“Huh?”

Annie scrunches her face, thinking, bracing for impact. 

There’s no turning back now that it’s out there.

“The kiss,” she clarifies slowly. “And the regret—it was, well, a _lot_ longer than I said it would be.”

There’s a sharp exhale on the other line. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

She can imagine him in this moment, wide-eyed, mouth parted, with his eyebrows halfway up his forehead. Hand at his jaw. Fingers itching to open a bottle of his endless supply of specially aged scotch. 

Jeff swallows so thickly she can hear it over the phone.

“I was joking at the time,” she says as if it’s any consolation. She might just be trying to console herself. “But yeah. I don’t know. Who would’ve thought?”

“How long?” Jeff asks, so quietly it’s barely a whisper above the static buzzing from the receiver.

“What?”

“How long did you regret the…”

He trails off. 

The silence stretches huge and gigantic between them.

“A long time,” Annie answers honestly.

“Are you—” His voice breaks this time before he clears his throat. “Are you thinking about it right now?”

Annie swallows hard. They’re well past tiptoeing into dangerous territory at this point. They’re foraying. _Exploring_. Peering over boundaries.

And of course she's thinking about it now: the kiss; the regret. All in vivid, technicolor detail. But she can’t say that.

This—the elusiveness of their confessions, the constant second-guessing, the unbearable emotion of it all— _this_ is why she stayed in DC, right? To get away from all the baggage? Her sudden, confused rage creeps up on her, warms her neck. Makes her hands shake. She nearly drops the phone.

She doesn’t answer.

At last, there’s a faint, strangled huff of air, like Jeff is holding his breath at the other end and he can’t keep it in his chest any longer.

“Forget it,” he says. “I just made things worse. That was dumb.”

“It wasn’t dumb.”

“Annie, you don’t have to make me feel better—”

“ _Jeff_.” She shakes her head to no one. “Stop. I—it’s hard, is all. I know it’s hard.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

His voice is miserable. He’s always been a bit like that—so much of his self loathing poured on her like gasoline, slick and messy and suffocating, and she could never quite scrub it out of her skin. It wasn’t fair, least of all to her, because what kind of grown man dumps all of his problems on an unsuspecting, innocent kid? But when she was eighteen and infatuated she didn’t care about fair. 

She still doesn’t, but she’s supposedly trying to change that.

Annie shuts her eyes tight, tired all over again. 

_Clean up your mess, Annie,_ she thinks with a sage, weary clarity. Maybe this is what they meant when they called her “mature beyond her years” or something equally condescending back at Greendale. _This is your fault. You called him tonight. You opened this can of worms. You might as well have bought the fucking can of worms at the supermarket with your enabling behavior._

“Jeff, I should go,” Annie says with a sudden urge to cry. 

She tries not to let her breaths sound too watery. He would get worried about her if he found out she was crying, hate himself more. Things would get harder.

There’s a beat of tense silence. 

“You—yeah, of course. Sure.”

“It’s getting late.”

“Oh, yeah. It must be—what, ten thirty over there?”

“Ten thirty-eight.” 

Annie feels herself getting choked up so she keeps the vowels clipped. Damn herself for crying so easily.

Again, neither of them end the call.

They’re both terrible at letting each other go, she remembers with a pang. 

So they sit in the silence for a while longer. The trajectory continues, undisturbed by external forces or proper logic. Inertia and all that. It's uncharacteristic for the both of them, really, since all they did was fight it for six years, but the quiet sound of each other's breathing seems to make tonight different.

Tonight is different for a lot of reasons, actually.

“Well, get some sleep over there, okay?” Jeff says finally, his voice gentle and tired and weary. It blends in with the quiet background static. "You're working yourself half to death."

"I'll try."

"I mean it, Annie," he adds passionately, his voice ragged. "It sucks to be—"

And then he's quiet. The emphasis in his voice scares her almost, amplifies her pulse in her ears. 

"To be what?" she ventures timidly.

She counts eight heart beats before he replies.

"To be so far away," he answers. "To not take care of the woman I love."

Annie blanches.

Squeezes her eyes closed.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. She isn’t supposed to hear him tell her that for the first time when they’re two time zones apart. When she’s supposed to be moving on with her life. But she let it happen when she waited.

She can’t help but say, plaintive, “Jeff—”

He doesn’t let her finish.

“I know.” A wry, bitter laugh. “I know— _god_. Fuck. I’m sorry. I wasn’t—you know.”

Annie bites her lip. “Yeah. But—”

“I just—you have to know that I love you, right? Yeah?”

The awful part is that she knows it’s true, not just some hollow, self-loathing bullshit that he’s putting on her. That part hurts the most.

“Yeah,” she says, “I know.” 

She forces herself to hang up this time, tears threatening to overflow. 

In the moment of silence she spends sitting by herself, she forgives him for telling her. They’re both just tired. She doesn’t need him to apologize for losing his restraint. 

All these late night calls—it was bound to break an eggshell eventually.

* * *

Annie takes a long shower after the call. She lets the water spill over her in rivulets, numb her body, and mix with her quiet, unfeeling tears. Then she cleans her skin thoroughly with the strongest-smelling body wash she has, like maybe it’ll erase her old self and her complicated emotions off of her flesh.

When Annie steps out of the shower, there’s two texts from Jeff.

 _I’m really sorry for what I said forget all of it_. 

Then, sent ten minutes later, _I miss you_

Annie blinks hard, staring at the screen until the words go blurry. She remembers that she's already forgiven him. Then she shuts off her phone and tucks herself in her blankets, trying to feel the rawness of clean skin, in the places that she scrubbed the hardest. 

It doesn’t work. All that gasoline is back, dripping in cold, lonely thrills down her spine. Familiar. Comforting. A toxic oil spill. But she falls asleep to it anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> [my tumblr/shithole/etc](https://shakespeareans.co.vu/)


End file.
